sunshine. His family. He was lucky to have them.
“So?” he said to Greg. “Is the place still standing?”
“It’s still there.”
“Any sign of damage?”
“Someone’s broken in.”
“They have?”
“But the place doesn’t looked wrecked or anything,” said Greg.
“So everything’s okay? All the vehicles and so forth?”
“Everything looks fine, Neil.”
“And you were able to land two choppers on the lawn okay?”
“That’s quite a place. I had no idea you’d done so well for yourself. And right next to Chattahoochee.
What a great location.”
“And you’ve got some guys up there right now?”
“The best. Harmon, Earl, and Scott. You remember those guys? Then I got some young guys.
Fernandes, Rostov, Douglas, Nabozniak, and Sinclair. All top-notch.”
Neil gestured toward the west. “So those guys down at the other end of the base—”
Greg shook his head, a slow shifting of his chin from side to side as his eyes seemed to seek out an indeterminate spot on the tarmac. “Just some disgruntled airmen who think with their stomachs, not with their heads.”
“How many are there?”
“Enough to make a nuisance of themselves.”
“So, like a… a mutiny?”
“A mutiny? I wouldn’t call it a mutiny. I would call it more a disgreement. About the way I’ve decided to ration the food. Especially now that we have a dwindling number of stores.”
“But they have guns.”
Greg squinted up at the sun. “And a few other things.”
“Greg, I have to make sure my family is safe.”
Greg looked away from the sun and focused on Neil. The change in attitude, though not profound, was signaled by a locking of his neck, a thrusting of his jaw, and a give-me-a-break narrowing of his eyes.
“You don’t have to worry about them, Neil. We’ve got a perimeter set up. And we’re bleeding all the stores to this end. If those guys don’t want to play by the rules, then it serves them right.”
“Maybe you should just airlift me and my family out now.”
Greg motioned up at the sky. “We have the second line to think of. I was speaking to Assistant Secretary of Defense Fonblanque personally about that. Once that’s done—”
“Are they sending more troops to deal with this…this little base insurgency?”
“Insurgency? Come on, Neil.”
“Whatever it is.”
“A bunch of young cadets playing with guns who don’t know any better. That’s what it is. We’ll have it mopped up in no time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Neil, work on the virus thing. Let me handle everything else. There’s no point in inventing problems for yourself when you’ve already got this big one to solve.”
21
The shadow of the mending shroud closed in on Wake County, and to Glenda it was like a vise closing around her soul. Her forehead was moist with perspiration. She was wearing her lightest cotton dress, material so thin it hardly weighed an ounce, but the heat now seemed to have a physical presence, a touch that was soft but insidious, and the temperature quickly drained a person’s energy.
She got up from bed and closed her hand around her cool rifle. Why didn’t they just get it over with?
The sheriff’s brother drove by every couple of hours now, his rusted hulk of a vehicle bumping and rattling along the road like a mechanical ghost. She knew that they knew about the extra food, and she also knew that they were going to make a try, so why didn’t they just do it? She listened, but heard no vehicle. Outside, a phantom green dusk settled over the dead, brown land. The quiet was like the breath of an old man expiring at Cedarvale in the middle of a sleepy afternoon.
She left her bedroom and stopped at Hanna’s door. Hanna sat by the window, leaning into the waning light as if she were a plant starved for sunshine. She held a book in her hands, couldn’t use the electronic reader, which she so often preferred for her school texts, but held an honest-to-God book, made out of honest-to-God paper; and it wasn’t just any book, but one of Hanna’s old books, a children’s book.
Hanna was holding it up to the remaining light with a far-off look in her eyes, and she looked so stoned on the medication from Cedarvale that Glenda was worried about her, and wondered if she was abusing the medication as a way to deaden her daily existence. When the medicine ran out, what then? Would Hanna literally cough herself to death? Would her body finally grow so weak from the racking coughs and lack of food that she would slip into a coma and die?
Her daughter turned in the slow and lugubrious way of a heroin addict riding the horse full speed.
“Jake’s asleep. You know that, don’t you?”
“What?”
“He was sleeping when I went for a pee.”
“But it’s only eight in the evening.”
“He’s been sleeping a lot.”
Glenda hurried to the living room.
In the dim green light coming through the picture window she saw Jake sprawled on the sofa, his arm hanging over the edge so that it touched the floor. The gun was next to his hand, its barrel angled off toward the front door, a box of bullets open beside it with a few cartridges, like scattered gold nuggets, on the floor. Yes, sleeping all the time, fourteen to sixteen hours a day, like the depressed old people at Cedarvale. Maybe she should have raided the Cedarvale dispensary for some happy pills as well.
She walked over and shook his arm. “Jake? Jake, honey?”
His head shot quickly to one side, and he was insensible for a few seconds as he clutched wildly for the gun.
Once he had it, he sat up. “Are they here? Are they here?”
“No, Jake, no. You fell asleep.”
Jake cast an anxious glance out the window. “Is that Buzz’s truck I hear?”
She listened, her paranoia taking hold like a bad fever. All she heard was the quiet. Not even any gunfire up in the hills anymore, as if they had all killed each other.
Jake got up and walked to the window. The fear came off him like sparks from a pinwheel—fear only a kid of twelve could feel. She walked to the window and joined him. She looked at the sky. The light of an August sunset seeped through the ragged hole in the green thing up there, and the edges of the hole, as it closed up, weren’t so much green as turquoise, as if hailstones refracted the light. The road was empty.
There was no sign of Maynard, Buzz, or Brennan—bastards, the lot of them.
“I’m going to one of the stashes to get some food,” she said. “You need something to eat. Eat something, then go to bed.”
“Which stash are you going to?”
“By the sycamores. Stash one.”
“Can I go?”
“You’ve got to stay here. In case they come.”